The Psions have both serial and infra red ports. Either can be used for connectivity, but most connectivity programs currently only have features for the serial port connection.

Serial cable

Armin Podtschaske x-rayed the "honda" connector.

Pin 1 is on the top and pin 15 is on the bottom. Only pins 2 through 8 and 15 are connected.

Pin 2: RTS

Pin 3: DTR

Pin 4: TXD

Pin 5: DSR

Pin 6: DCD

Pin 7: CTS

Pin 8: RXD

Pin 15: GND - Signal and Power ground

Frame: GND - Shield frame ground

IrDA

See Werner Heuser's
Infrared HOWTO for information about using the Linux IrDA driver with a Psion. It is possible to beam files from Psion 5 (mx) via Linux-IrDA to a Linux System. The irda-utils include a special client psion5.c which can beam files
between them.

Builtin programs

There are two builtin software methods to use the communications ports. The first is the remote link, <ctrl>-l from the main file menu, which can be set to serial, infrared or off.

EPOC also provides the program comms. The remote link must be set to off for the comms program to have access to the serial port.

First start ncpd get it to listen on a port (7501 by default) for connection requests. Then, start either plpnfsd or plpftp. plpnfsd defaults to mount the Psion under /mnt/psion.

p3nfs/p5nfs

Description

p3nfs mounts the psion drives over the serial cable at /psion.stand/mnt, by default.

ncp

Description

Matt Gumbley originally started
ncp for use with his Psion Series 3. Now that he's working on
plptools, you should use that :). However, ncp might still be of interest to users of a Psion Series 3, which this HOWTO doesn't cover :). Matt's ncp page also has information about the plp protocol.

Psiconv

Description

Psiconv translates Psion Word documents or TextEd files (as used by the OPL editor, for example) to HTML (3.2 or 4.0) or plain text. It can also translate Sketch files and MBM files to almost any graphics format. A description of the Psion files formats is also included.

python

BProlog

Shell5

Description

Nick Murray has created
Shell5, which is a command line interpreter which allows basic file operations as well as some sophisticated functions such as command history, filename expansion, batch file support, input and output redirection, pipe like feature :), aliases and shell variables, keyboard remapping and macros and UNIX or DOS syntax for pathnames.

E_Shell

Description

E-shell comes with the SDK and is a DOS-like shell environment from the EPOC SDK. It provides ways to launch programs from a command line; to check for file system corruption; to create, edit and display plain text files; to check on currently active processes and threads. The former link to download the shell itself has been removed.